By August, Fred was fully into serious training of every kind. Having been a world record swimmer along with Mark Spitz, Charlie Hickock, and Don Schollander on the 400m individual relay team at Stanford, Fred knew what conditioning and training did for your mental attitude during competition. His personal life had undergone some nasty upheavals. His brother was killed in a car accident, and the fortune in real estate that he had amassed came crashing down with the Japanese meltdown we saw here. Fred could see the end of the property bubble aiming at him, sold off everything he could, and decided to just take a look at life from a different perspective.

To that end, he invested a small amount in being part owner of Sailboards Maui, along with Bill King, and Mike Waltze, and mostly went sailing every day. He got better and better. His body type was perfect for speed. Big muscled shoulders, powerful ankles, and long arms. We actually called that 'gorillability'. His reach was almost 10cm more than mine, and I am taller. And, he was training for speed in the ocean swells and chop. A bit like using ankle weights. When the water got smoother, it would be a breeze.

Our sailmaking was now rapidly evolving to the use of full battens. The Tri-Radial design was a decent sail out of the pack, but we knew that more efficiency could be had if we could stabilize the foil surface. Yuri Farrant, a famous Oahu based surf film maker, had a sail that was built with full battens, probably the first windsurf sail like that (probably made by Pat Love) and it seemed to be working just fine. So we started adding battens to our sails, and figuring out how to tension them. Up until that time we had been using little bits of string and tiny grommets, tying knots to get the wrinkles out. But with the battens all longer than one meter, we needed more than that.

There were lots of plastic buckle types that were used for awnings and covers, and with a little refinement we quickly had those working to tension our battens. There were still big lumpy things and flapping tails of webbing, but the battens would be smooth and properly tension the skin of the foil. The real test was if Fred could get more out of them, and that was quickly proven right. From then on, the 'soft' sail was just history. It still would take years before the trend would move everyone away from soft sails (there were plenty of guys who didn't want to give them up, like Alex Aguera and Matt Schweitzer) but that was because they were so used to the other feel. Full batten sails behaved completely differently in manuevers, and the 'old school' Windsurfer crowd hung on the longest. But people coming in new had no real comparison, and most never went the 'soft' way.

But for then, full batten sails were like space ships. People would see Fred blasting down the coast with this much more wingy looking thing, and they'd be coming by the loft wanting to know what it was and where could they get them. We were making fifteen Tri-Radial customs every week, and had orders for months down the calendar, and no patterns for these new ideas. This was something that Maui would always be bad for... no secrets here.

Meanwhile, the Wings showed up. There were two of them. They looked like they were made in the garage, not smooth at all, probably vacuum bagged. There was a small aluminum tube running up the trailing edge, and it had been cut with a groove so you could make a sail with a bolt rope finish. That is a small bead of rope sewn into a folded tape on the luff. This is then fed into the groove, making a perfect connection to the mast. The base had a tube for a standard universal base, and the top was just a slug of plastic to put a sheet metal screw into. There was a strong but crude aluminum bracket to attach a boom, but nothing else. We had less than two months to figure it out.

Pinheads do it in Hawaii. Zippy inspired, and executed again by Tommy Cook, these shirts were in reaction to the names people had given all the various sails. There were Fat Heads, Diamondheads, Roundheads, Squareheads, PowerHeads, and of course, everything that was left was in the Pinhead category. We couldn't help it.